BOOK REVIEWS 411 here the aim is not so much to open new doors as it is to demonstrate how the "fanatical masses" (a favorite phrase) stayed the hand ofbenevolent rulers. If there is a single, overriding flaw to this book, it lies in this single-minded determination to make a rich history of Christian-pagan relations fit into a one-dimensional argument regarding church and state. The intention to show Christians in a dynamic relationship with the Roman state is a good one. It need not be put to such transparent uses. H. A. Drake University of California, Santa Barbara From Eusebius to Augustine-. Selected Papers, 1982-1993- By T. D. Barnes. [Collected Studies Series: CS438.] (Brookfield, Vermont: Variorum, Ashgate Publishing Co. 1994. Pp. xii, 334. $9195.) This useful book is a recent addition to the "Collected Studies Series" published by Variorum and brings together in the compass of a single volume twenty-two studies on fourth-century imperial and ecclesiastical history previously published as journal articles, book chapters, and professional lectures —plus two new studies made specifically for this volume—by Timothy D. Barnes, professor of classics in the University of Toronto and one of the world's most prolific and distinguished scholars of late antiquity. The studies are grouped into four Parts, with a short Addenda section and an index at the end of the book. Part One, labeled "Introductory," contains two short studies giving an overview of "Pagan Perceptions of Christianity" (I), and arguing against "Some Inconsistencies in Eusebius" (II). In the latter, Barnes defends his thesis that Eusebius completed the first seven books of his Ecclesiastical History before 303, and that those books provide accurate evidence for the standing of the Church in the empire before the start of Diocletian's persecution. Part Two concerns the era of "Constantine" and encompasses ten studies which largely defend the views Barnes posited in his seminal books, Constantine and Eusebius and The New Empire ofDiocletian and Constantine (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981 and 1982 respectively ). Study IH argues that "The Conversion of Constantine" was, in fact, in the emperor's political interest, and follows H. Schrörs in seeing Eusebius as the more reliable source for that event; and it analyzes Constantine's "Oration to the Assembly ofSaints" as a source for the emperor's intellectual attainments and Christian knowledge in the decade thereafter. In several of the studies in this part, particularly IV on "Constantine's Prohibition of Pagan Sacrifice," V on "The Constantinian Reformation," and IX on "The Constantinian Settlement ," Professor Barnes defends what he elsewhere has labeled his "novel, even heterodox or idiosyncratic views . . . that the Roman Empire became 412 BOOK REVIEWS Christian earlier, and in the fourth century became more thoroughly Christian than has normally been supposed by academic historians of the last hundred years" (XXI, p. 158). Against critics such as H. A. Drake and R. M. Errington, he persuasively argues that Eusebius' statements in his Vita Constantini II. 45 indicate that Constantine outlawed pagan sacrifice in the east, and established Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the autumn of 324 after his successful crusade against the last persecuting pagan emperor, Licinius. He shows that the evidence in Eusebius' Tricennalia Oration and Commentary on Isaiah, plus the testimony of Constans' law in the Codex Theodosianus buttress this assessment, and must be preferred to the late and tendentious statements of Libanius. Studies VII and VIII on "The Religious Affiliation of Consuls and Prefects, 317-361," and "Christians and Pagans in the Reign of Constantius," reveal that among the high officials of the Roman government whose religious affiliations can be ascertained with any certainty, there were more Christians than pagans by the mid-fourth century. In the final two studies of this part, XI on "Panegyric, History and Hagiography in Eusebius' Life of Constantine," and XII on "The Two Drafts of Eusebius' Life of Constantine," he provides detailed analyses of the literary genres and compositional stages behind this key work in the Eusebian corpus. In these carefully argued and detailed studies, he builds upon G. Pasquali's theory that the Vita was a conflation of two drafts that began as...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Aug 10, 2007
Klaus Martin Girardet 
Open Access